today i went with my roommate to a burger joint on ossington. it was nearly full when we came on, and we lucked into the last empty table in the place, one that seated four people. after we'd been sitting there for a minute or two, three things happened:
1. my roommate went to the washroom.
2. a couple at a two-person table behind us finished and left.
3. a group of four came into the restaurant.
seeing what was happening, i anticipated the next move; sure enough, the waiter came up and asked me if we'd mind switching tables, so we could optimize the table usage. having readied myself for this scenario, i quickly agreed, and moved my coat to the other table. however, with my roommate still in the washroom, i had to move her stuff as well, which i was unprepared for. to my surprise, she not only had a coat, but her phone sitting on the table, and TWO different bags. as i struggled to figure out how to move all of her belongings in one smooth move, the waiter swopped in and took half of it, saving me some potential embarrassment.
10/31/2009
thursday october 29
today i was tasked with buying new hand soap for our bathroom. before leaving for the weekend, my roommate had instructed me to buy something that "smells nice." after grabbing lunch with a friend, i stopped at shopper's drug mart on my way home and perused the soap section. each choice seemed to combine two scents, and in most cases i was only familiar with one of the two, making it impossible to guess what the two scents would smell like together. finally, i settled on "coconut papaya." when i got home and used it for the first time, i was a bit unsettled by the aroma that rose from my hands, but it's growing on me.
10/30/2009
wednesday october 28
today i was connected to the internet most of the day through a network that wasn't our own. ours has been off and on lately, and a rogers visit isn't expected until friday, but i found that if i sat in certain parts of the house, i was able to get a strong signal from someone else's connection. i didn't think much of this until i went to close my itunes for the night and received a notification that i was sharing my library with someone. confused, since my roommates were both out of town, i looked at the shared libraries and saw one entitled "sara's music...is awesome." i don't know where my internet is coming from, but now i know it's sara's, and i know she's onto me.
tuesday october 27
today i had a dream in which i used my visa card for a purchase. when i pulled it out of my wallet, though, instead of my usual visa card, this one was all white, and drew a few oohs and ahhs from the people i was with (in the dream). when i woke up, i wondered if this notion of a white card had come from listening to the clipse and jay-z rap about the powerful black card one too many times. and if this was the case, had my subconscious turned it into a white card for me because i lacked their v.i.p. status, or was it a race thing?
10/29/2009
monday october 26
today i was leaving the central commerce school's gym following my weekly dodgeball game. walking away from the school, i suddenly realized that my wallet wasn't in the back pocket of my jeans, where it had been when i'd arrived a couple hours earlier. having taken off the jeans to change into athletic gear and then having left them unattended, i immediately became convinced that my wallet had been stolen. my mind began racing through the faces on the other team, wondering which of them would be the most likely to have stolen my wallet. it was around the time when i thought of their lone black player (wondering if it would be more offensive to consider him a prime suspect or to rule him out entirely), that i realized it was entirely possible that the wallet had slipped out of my pocket while the jeans were in my backpack. i reached in and found it right away. embarrassed by my thought process, i decided to blame my instinctive mental accusations on the fact that i was a sore loser (the other team had beat us at dodgeball).
sunday october 25
today i was prepared to watch mad men at 10:00 at my parents' house. however, shortly before it began, i found out that my mother was using the vcr on this tv to record the second hour of the so you think you can dance canada finale, rendering the other channels unwatchable.
saturday october 24
today i visited my grandmother in the hospital (don't worry, loyal readers, these weren't our last words after all). when my brother and i arrived, the nurse asked my grandmother if we were her grandsons, and she answered "my great grandsons!" after a moment's pause, she was corrected, but to avoid the discomfort of confronting her fading memory, i interjected: "i think she was using 'great' as an adjective!!"
10/27/2009
friday october 23
today i got a ride back to london for the weekend. because i was traveling via car and not bus, like usual, i entirely forgot to bring my ipod and headphones. although this wasn't a huge factor on the ride to london, it had me dreading in advance the eventual bus ride back to toronto.
thursday october 22
today i rode my first toronto subway car with puke all over its floor. seminal moment.
10/22/2009
tuesday october 20
today i was having trouble with our internet connection for a good chunk of the night, before it finally stopped working altogether around 9:30. annoyed, i came downstairs to find my roommate watching being erica and having similar problems with the television (indicating that the problem must lie with our entire rogers connection). however, it turned out to be far more entertaining to watch her frustrated reactions to a choppy broadcast than it would have been to watch being erica itself.
monday october 19
today i was walking down bloor street toward the laundromat when a tall beer can fell out of the sky and landed at my feet, about three feet in front of me. i can only assume the gusty winds blew the empty tallboy off some sort of balcony, rather than it actually raining from the sky, but the fact that it was a brand that i'd been drinking lately was unnerving.
10/21/2009
saturday october 17
today i downloaded an alternative to microsoft messenger for mac, called adium. my issue with msn had been its recent habit of no longer alerting me to people signing online. however, adium posed another problem: it didn't keep me updated when i received new e-mails at my hotmail address. when deciding which of these two evils was lesser, the tiebreaker turned out to be adium's presence at the bottom of my screen -- when the program was open, this bird(?) studied me intently. when i closed the program, he turned around, his back now facing me. quite frankly, both of these poses made me very uncomfortable and resulted in my return to msn.
friday october 16
today i bought a bag of reese's peanut butter cups while grocery shopping, under the guise of "being prepared for halloween, in case we get any trick-or-treaters." in actuality, i'll probably have eaten them all by the end of the weekend. not halloween weekend. this weekend.
thursday october 15
today i asked my roommate if she was watching the office on our west coast global affiliate (meaning we could watch it three hours later than its usual 9:00 airtime). she had forgotten about it, but did intend to watch, which was slightly disappointing to me, since i'd secretly wanted to watch the world series of poker at 12:00, saving the office for later. so, at 12:30, when the office finished, i decided not to ask if she'd be watching 30 rock too, instead flipping to poker and chasing her out of the living room.
10/19/2009
wednesday october 14
today i went to a friend's house to drop something off and to say hi. still feeling sick (though not nearly as bad as i had been yesterday), i suggested, upon arriving, that we just stay in the lobby area inside the door so i wasn't bringing my germs up into the house. when i suggested this, i anticipated a brief visit, maybe ten minutes. we ended up spending approximately an hour standing right inside the door, twice having to awkwardly move out of the way for people coming in and out of the house.
tuesday october 13
today i had what genuinely felt like the sickest day of my life. i spent most of the day in bed, since lying down was the only position that wasn't entirely uncomfortable and painful. ultimately, though i was only able to sleep for about nine hours, i spent approximately 17 hours of the day in bed.
monday october 12
today i had one of those dreams where you think that you wake up. within the dream, after i fake-"woke up," i went on to describe to my dad a dream that i'd had about fantasy baseball. when i woke up for real and realized that i'd just dreamt about retelling a fantasy baseball dream, it caused me to seriously worry about the lack of excitement in my life these days.
sunday october 11
today i received my first bona-fide insulting comment on one of my mlbtraderumors posts, when a commenter wrote: "this luke adams character...doesn't know a baseball rumor from a fart."
10/12/2009
saturday october 10
today i headed over to rotate this to buy tickets for the upcoming raveonettes show, worried that it was on the verge of selling it. during the last block of the walk along queen street, i was stuck behind a slow-walking couple, unable to pass them because of heavy sidewalk traffic. when we finally arrived at rotate this, they walked into the store ahead of me and immediately made their way to the counter and asked for two raveonettes tickets. i instantly regretted not being more aggressive on the sidewalk, but luckily there were at least another two tickets available for my purchase. if they'd gotten the last two, it would've turned me into a maniac on the streets. sidewalk rage galore.
friday october 9
today had a girl invite herself over to watch baseball with me for the first time in my life.
thursday october 8
today i went to the nearby post office to pick up a package that had arrived for me. the notification i'd received suggested bringing both identification and address verification (my address on my driver's license being different than where i'm living now). this resulted in my sorting through my garbage can trying to find my last phone bill from rogers, which was the only thing i could think of that would have my address on it. i was unsuccessful. i decided to take our lease instead. when i got to the post office, not only was i not asked for address verification but i didn't even have to show any ID. given my level of preparation, it was a bit of a letdown.
wednesday october 7
today i was walking to shopper's drug mart on bloor when i looked across the street and noticed a man sprawled out, unmoving on the sidewalk, with a few people gathered around him. one was on a cell phone. morbidly fascinated, but figuring there was nothing i could do to help, i continued to shopper's. after buying what i needed and leaving the store, i saw a fire truck drive by with its siren blaring to the spot where the man was laid out, followed closely by an ambulance. when i passed by on my way home, four firefighters had gathered around the man but didn't look all that urgent to jump into action. i still have no idea whether it was a routine unconscious guy or if i saw my first real-life dead body.
tuesday october 6
today i referred to an episode of the o.c. as "the rapeisode" and immediately felt sort of guilty about it.
10/06/2009
monday october 5
today i dreamed that i was a player on the football team from friday night lights (tv version) and that on the bus on the way to the game, the team and i sang a song whose lyrics were about me. although the song was clearly a bizarre concoction of my own subconscious, i had it stuck in my head for about 10 minutes after waking up.
sunday october 4
today i was walking out of trinity bellwoods, across the intersection at dundas and shaw. with the light about to change to red and no cars coming southbound on the one-way street, i started to cross the road. it was at this point that i noticed a cyclist fly past me heading northbound, against the one-way street. i looked over and noticed two more coming my way, so i decided to stop walking and stand in place, allowing them to fly past me with no danger. this turned out to be a poor decision. one of the cyclists slammed into me, leaving me bruised and unable to feel my right hand (which hit the pavement first), for the next hour.
saturday october 3
today i headed to a friend's new house for a housewarming celebration. walking along the dark street, i was mostly staring at the hard-to-read house numbers, attempting to figure out which house was his. it wasn't until i was almost on top of him that i realized he was standing over the curb outside his house, attempting to pick up a bag of change (mostly pennies) that had fallen into the rainy street. at first i just assumed this was a homeless person.
friday october 2
today i wrote up my first breaking news story at mlbtraderumors.com, experiencing a curious balance of paranoia about getting facts wrong and urgency about getting the story up as quickly as possible.
thursday october 1
today i was walking along college street when i heard music that appeared to be coming closer and closer. i glanced around, attempting to figure out what restaurant or bar or store it was coming from, but the noise seemed to be moving at a much faster pace than i was walking. i then noticed that someone was biking past me with a jukebox in tow, blasting "dangerous" by kardinal offishall, featuring akon.
10/03/2009
wednesday september 30
today i was walking down ossington when a girl on a bike pedaled up and stopped me. she introduced herself in what sounded like an australian accent, telling me she was a writer who was writing a story about hand sanitizer. "have you ever heard of anyone...eating the stuff?" she asked me. "um... no," i replied, after some thought. there was a pause in the conversation and i added: "is that... all?" she cheerily replied "yep!" and biked off. i probably didn't contribute enough to make the acknowledgements section on that one.
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